symbolset writes: In the realm of "stuff that matters", the current outbreak of the world's second deadliest disease continues to expand. 63 new cases are reported in the last week, and suspected cases far afield of the hot zone are reported.

Many reports of a lack of personal protective equipment and medical professionals abandoning their posts are in recent reports. The local populace is developing processes to prevent containment.

Ebola remains the second deadliest infection only because rabies victims have only one survivor reported after onset of symptoms, ever.

mpicpp writes: Following through on promises from new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft continues to add support for non-Microsoft technologies, allowing them to run well on the company’s Azure cloud hosting platform.

The company has partnered with two organizations that offer popular open source programs for managing cloud resources—Packer and OpenNebula. Microsoft is releasing drivers that will make it easy to use the programs on Azure, as well as with Microsoft server software for in-house deployments.

Packer is increasingly being used by system administrators to create and then manage the operations of virtual machine images. Running from any OS, Packer assembles and configures the necessary components for a virtual machine and can create identical copies to run on different platforms, such as Linux and Windows.

Packer can also work with popular open source configuration tools such as Chef and Puppet to automate the procedures of rolling out many virtual machines at once.

“Packer has been so popular lately that we heard from people that they want it see it on Azure,” Mahugh said.

Microsoft is also adding support for the OpenNebula cloud management software. OpenNebula could be a key technology for companies interested in running hybrid clouds, a model in which some operations run on a public cloud like Azure and others run in-house, perhaps on a private cloud.

Pitir writes: Physicists have discovered a possible solution to a mystery that has long baffled researchers working to harness fusion. If confirmed by experiment, the finding could help scientists eliminate a major impediment to the development of fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for producing electric power.

An in-depth analysis by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) zeroed in on tiny, bubble-like islands that appear in the hot, charged gases—or plasmas—during experiments. These minute islands collect impurities that cool the plasma. And it is these islands, the scientists report in the April 20 issue of Physical Review Letters, that are at the root of a long-standing problem known as the “density limit” that can prevent fusion reactors from operating at maximum efficiency.

raknair07 writes: The University of Florida is about to gut its computer science department. How can it be that an apparently strong university can consider this? I asked one of the department's professors.

neo00 writes: "Syrians, Sudanese, N. Koreans, Cubans and Iranians will now be prohbitied from downloading or contributing to FOSS projects hosted by Sourceforge.net. According to sf.net terms of use, persons residing one of the countries on which the US government imposes sanctions, will be banned from accessing the site contents. An act that violates the Freedoms of Free Software and the "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups" from the OSS definition.US sanctions on these countries were initiated or hardened during the administration of Bush who called them the "Axis of Evil"."